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The McCain Doctrines

Whatever their disagreements on policy, United States senators, even in today’s hyperpolitical climate, are reluctant to impugn one another’s motives or integrity.

That’s doubly true among those who experienced combat in the Vietnam War, a group that now includes four sitting senators — the Republicans John McCain and Chuck Hagel and the Democrats John Kerry and Jim Webb — as well as former colleagues like Bob Kerrey, Max Cleland and Chuck Robb. These men share an obvious bond, and over the years they have more readily crossed partisan lines than other senators, constituting, in some ways, a party unto themselves. To outsiders, they give the impression of having seen things in their youth that confer a different kind of perspective on mere politics; they seem to know that there are worse things in life than losing an election and having to go home. In contrast to the insecurities of the many boomer politicians who avoided service in Vietnam or marched against it, the Senate’s former soldiers exude a confidence that goes beyond military matters.

The war in Iraq has tested some of these friendships, however. Last year, after House Democrats voted to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, McCain and Webb — both of whom were featured heroes in a classic book on the era, Robert Timberg’s “Nightingale’s Song” — became embroiled in an unusually public disagreement. After McCain pointedly said the enemy in Iraq was celebrating along with Democrats, Webb accused him of unfairly questioning other people’s patriotism. When Webb and Hagel (a close personal friend of McCain’s) proposed a bill to give troops leaving Iraq and Afghanistan more time at home before redeploying, McCain, whose 19-year-old son has served with the Marines in Iraq, forcefully opposed them, saying the troops were needed in the theater. More recently, McCain has found himself on the opposite side of Webb and Hagel again, this time over their “G.I. bill” that would offer education money to every returning veteran. McCain and others want a more limited bill that would encourage rank-and-file soldiers to re-enlist rather than return to civilian life.

In these skirmishes, McCain is the outlier. Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history.”) This divide among old allies may be the inevitable result of a protracted war that has cleaved plenty of American households and friendships. But it may also be that the war is revealing underlying fractures among the Senate’s Vietnam coalition.

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory that the singularity of his war experience has anything to do with his intransigence on Iraq. (Bob Kerrey, for one, told me that while he was aware of this argument, he has never believed it.) But some suspect that whatever lesson McCain took away from his time in Vietnam, it was not the one that stayed with his colleagues who were “in country” during those years — that some wars simply can’t be won on the battlefield, no matter how long you fight them, no matter how many soldiers you send there to die.

“McCain is my friend and brother, and I love him dearly,” Max Cleland, Georgia’s former Democratic senator, told me when we talked last month. “But I think you learn something fighting on the ground, like me and John Kerry and Chuck Hagel did in Vietnam. This objective of ‘hearts and minds’? Well, hello! You didn’t know which heart and mind was going to blow you up!

“I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends,” says Cleland, who lost three of his limbs to an errant grenade during the battle of Khe Sanh. “With thousands dead and tens of thousands more injured, and years later you ask yourself what you were doing there. To the extent my friend John McCain signs on to this, he is endangering America’s long-term interests, and probably his own election in the fall.”

If it is true that McCain’s Vietnam experience left him with a different attitude about foreign wars from the one held by those who were on the ground, then it certainly wasn’t apparent earlier in his political career. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, after he arrived in the Senate, McCain was, in fact, an outspoken opponent of American intervention in faraway lands — at least in cases where the country wasn’t willing to lose thousands of lives to achieve its aims. But during the post-cold-war 1990s, as America’s foreign-policy establishment struggled to define the nation’s obligations to the rest of the world, McCain went through his own kind of inner journey, seeking some balance between the legacy of Vietnam and the pull of new crises around the globe — crises born of savagery and rife with human consequence. That journey led him inexorably toward Iraq, where McCain’s resolve hardened to the point that now, as he prepares to run the climactic campaign of his life, he finds himself carrying the weight of another war, one that has divided the country and devastated his party. One way or the other, Iraq will determine this last phase of McCain’s political life, as surely as the war in Vietnam defined its beginning.

WHEN CAPTAIN McCAIN returned home from Hanoi in 1973, a grateful Navy gave him and his fellow P.O.W.’s their choice of assignments. McCain rather audaciously chose one normally reserved for higher-ranking officers: study at the prestigious National War College. The war in Vietnam collapsed during the five-plus years of his imprisonment, and McCain needed to understand what happened. He absorbed the writings of military historians, most notably Bernard Fall, a veteran of the French resistance who was a sharp critic of the American military in Vietnam. Fall, who lived (and died) among American troops in Vietnam, didn’t quibble with America’s strategic decision to intervene in the country, but he did lambaste its tactics: hunting down guerrillas in search-and-destroy patrols, trying to draw the Vietcong into traditional military battles. Fall believed the Americans did not learn from the failure in Indochina of the French, who insisted on fighting a jungle insurgency as if it were the Second World War.

In his book, Chuck Hagel writes of listening to declassified tapes from the mid-1960s in which Lyndon Johnson admitted to advisers that Vietnam probably couldn’t be won but rued that withdrawal would make him the first American president to lose a war. “I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy,” Hagel observes acidly. Although McCain was held and tortured for the same cause, he never saw the situation the way Hagel did. In his view, the American effort began to turn around with the promotion in 1968 of Gen. Creighton Abrams, who adopted the tactics favored by counterinsurgency experts like Fall. Abrams pulled back the search-and-destroy teams and instead focused on winning the “hearts and minds” of South Vietnamese villagers. His goal was to encourage the South Vietnamese military to take over their own defense — the process that came to be known as “Vietnamization.” McCain maintains that Abrams’s strategy was working, but it was undercut by the fact that, by that point, the American public had already rendered its verdict, and the drawdown of troops continued until the war’s chaotic end.

The lesson McCain and other conservatives took away from this version of history is that America was driven from Vietnam principally because the voters, discouraged by dire reports from a skeptical media, lost their will. McCain has said in the past that he felt the war could have been won had the right strategy been followed sooner. When I met with McCain last month for a far-ranging conversation about Vietnam and Iraq, I asked him whether he still felt this was the case. “These are all hypotheticals,” he replied. “But I think that if we had employed the strategy that Creighton Abrams put into effect when he relieved General Westmoreland” — that is, if the Abrams strategy had been used years earlier — “then at least the casualties would have been dramatically different.”

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Credit
Jeff Riedel

As a new congressman in 1983, among the first of his generation of vets to serve in Washington, McCain brought with him an attitude toward American intervention similar to what would later come to be known as the Powell Doctrine, for its author, Colin Powell: simply put, if you were going to use the American military to end a dispute or displace a foreign government, then you had to have the American public firmly on your side and you had to be prepared to use overwhelming force to achieve your aims. Late that year, when his party’s popular president, Ronald Reagan, proposed to extend the deployment of the Marines in Beirut, McCain was one of just 27 Republican representatives to object. The soldiers didn’t have a clear mission, McCain said, nor enough numbers to affect the outcome of the conflict. (Ultimately, 241 American servicemen died when a suicide bomber struck the Marine compound there, and American forces were withdrawn.)

McCain strongly supported other operations, like the American-led invasion of tiny Grenada in 1983, as well as the first gulf war in 1991. But his first term in the Senate, which began in 1987, was marked mostly by extreme caution when it came to inserting American troops into foreign wars. As a newly arrived senator serving on the Armed Services Committee, McCain opposed Reagan’s plan to fly the American flag on Kuwaiti oil tankers that were coming under fire from Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf. In August 1992, when the Bush administration and its allies were trying to get humanitarian aid to Bosnians caught in a multiethnic civil war, McCain broke with the majority of Republicans and voted against a resolution that authorized “demonstrations of force” in the region; he called it recklessly provocative. After the ambush in Somalia that claimed the lives of 18 American soldiers in October 1993, a frustrated McCain introduced a resolution to bring the troops home immediately. Bob Dole, a staunch internationalist and then the Republican minority leader, persuaded other senators to defeat it.

McCAIN’S CRITICS HAVE pointed to this early part of his political career to make the case that he later underwent a radical change in his philosophy, veering from a cautious approach to military force to a more hawkish, even bellicose mentality. His own aides, meanwhile, contend that McCain’s philosophy has been entirely constant; they say his opposition to limited and ill-defined operations like Somalia and Bosnia wasn’t at all inconsistent with his willingness, later, to use overwhelming force against a tyrant like Saddam Hussein.

The problem with these narratives is that neither reflects the context of the time. As two former national security officials in the Clinton administration, Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, explain compellingly in “America Between the Wars,” a book to be published next month, the period between the cold war and the war on terror — the 90s, roughly speaking — was a decade when foreign-policy thinkers across the ideological spectrum were groping about in darkness, trying to feel out the limits of American power and to balance the twin risks of action and inaction. During that time, the United States bounced from one unforeseen crisis to another, undertaking a military intervention every 18 months, on average — a staggering pace compared with that of the years that came before. Old ideological alliances in Washington were shattered and reformed, as pacifists lined up with conservative isolationists to battle liberal hawks and neoconservatives. New terms — “failed state,” “humanitarian intervention,” “ethnic cleansing” — entered the American lexicon. It’s fair to say, then, that McCain did evolve in his views on when and how to use American force over the course of the decade, but it’s misleading to separate his evolution from the larger transformation that was happening all around him.

During the cold war, the guiding framework for military intervention was built around a pretty straightforward set of questions: were American forces needed to stop the expansion of Soviet ideology or territory, and if so, were the potential casualties worth the risk? When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, however, that framework disappeared almost overnight. Ecstatic policy makers slashed the size of the military and hoped for a “peace dividend.” In a famous article in 1989, Francis Fukuyama posited that we were witnessing “the end of history”; from that time forward, the theory went, mankind would drift inexorably away from totalitarianism toward individual freedom and democracy. Fukuyama didn’t actually advocate that the United States retreat from its assertive global role, but that’s what many in Washington — and especially conservatives — chose to hear. The long war was over, and America could now focus on defending its own borders, using technologies like missile defense, rather than sending its soldiers abroad to “police the world.”

McCain explicitly rejected this idea, and yet he wasn’t eager to commit American troops to humanitarian missions that could easily turn into military nightmares like Somalia. For him, as for others, the defining dilemma of this new terrain was Bosnia. In July 1995, after years of debate in Washington about how to stop Serbian forces from wiping out the Bosnian Muslims, the Serbs overran the town of Srebrenica and, while Dutch peacekeepers stood by, mowed down thousands of Muslim boys and men. Coming not long after the mass killings in Rwanda, the slaughter in Srebrenica again brought the moral implications of inaction home to American politicians — especially those who, like McCain, previously opposed armed intervention.

NATO responded with a series of airstrikes against Bosnian Serbs, which ultimately pushed the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, to negotiate a settlement to the war. Clinton then urged Congress to approve the deployment of 20,000 American troops to help enforce the agreement. At the time, McCain was supporting the presidential campaign of his friend Phil Gramm, who was running against Dole in the Republican primaries. Gramm opposed the intervention, and he pleaded with McCain to stand by him; instead, this time, McCain decided to partner with Dole to ensure passage of the supporting resolution, stifling significant Republican opposition. It was a turning point, both for McCain and American consensus as a whole. “The Bosnian intervention was life-changing for a lot of people,” Bob Kerrey told me. “It caused even some liberals to go from opposing intervention to supporting it.”

Throughout the late ’90s, McCain criticized what he called Clinton’s “feckless photo-op foreign policy,” but he also emerged as an important bulwark for the administration against Republicans who reflexively opposed Clinton’s every move as commander in chief. McCain strongly supported airstrikes against Sudan and Afghanistan, in retaliation for terrorist attacks on two American Embassies, and against Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was obstructing weapons inspectors. In 1999, McCain took the lead in supporting the bombing of Serbia to prevent another genocide in Kosovo. His tone had changed considerably since the days before Srebrenica. “Our interests and values converge clearly here,” McCain said in a speech from the Senate floor. “It seems clear to me that Milosevic knows no limits to his inhumanity and will keep slaughtering until even the most determined opponent of American involvement in this conflict is convinced to drop that opposition.”

By the time McCain ran for president in 2000, he was the one arguing in debates for a more robust military presence in humanitarian crises, while George W. Bush forswore “nation building” and vowed a more “humble” foreign policy. During that campaign, McCain introduced the closest thing he had found to a doctrine for foreign intervention: the “rogue-state rollback,” under which he proposed arming and training internal forces that might ultimately overthrow menacing regimes in countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

McCain’s more ambitious view of American power made him a natural ally of neoconservative thinkers like William Kristol, the editor of the fledgling Weekly Standard (now a New York Times columnist), and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Empowered during the Reagan era, the neocons were largely shoved aside during the ’90s by the more isolationist, anti-Clinton voices who dominated Republican politics. By the time McCain expanded his circle of influence to include Kristol and other neocons in the late ’90s, they had rallied around a single unifying cause: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1998, McCain was one of the sponsors of the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton, which officially changed American policy from containing Hussein to deposing him, and he became a leading figure in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a lobbying group founded by Randy Scheunemann, who is now his chief foreign policy adviser. McCain met with Ahmad Chalabi, the smooth Iraqi dissident who was a favorite of the neocons, and supported him publicly.

After the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the sudden elevation of Al Qaeda as a defining national security threat, McCain never had any doubt that Iraq, with its supposed capability to unleash or share weapons of mass destruction, posed an existential threat to the United States. Reading his statements from the time, there is no indication that he ever judged the invasion of Iraq by the standard he had used earlier in his career — whether it had the potential to become another Vietnam. Instead, as American troops swarmed Baghdad, McCain repeatedly compared Hussein to Adolf Hitler and predicted that the occupation of Iraq would be remembered in much the same way that history celebrated the liberation and rebuilding of Europe and Japan.

I ARRANGED TO TALK with McCain during the last week of April, before a fund-raising event at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Tampa. When he strode, an hour late, into the conference room his campaign had reserved, his gait was rushed and purposeful and his manner decidedly businesslike. Having survived the sadism of the Vietcong and, more recently, skin cancer, McCain these days shows the wear of his 71 years. His face is more topographically interesting than it was when he first ran for president eight years ago, the skin folding into small craters and valleys as it runs into his neckline. His eyes look warier and less mischievous than they did back then. You can imagine, looking at him, how McCain spent much of these last few years: beseeching and indulging Republican power brokers, many of whom he does not like, all the while tolerating their lectures, bridling his infamous temper, keeping the irritation pent up. Perhaps repression exacts its cost.

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McCain (lower right) with his squadron in 1965.Credit
Library of Congress

Sitting down at the end of a long granite table, he greeted me warmly, and then, before I could ask a question or even introduce the subject at hand, he dove headlong into a five-minute soliloquy. He told me that he had just driven in from the airport on Eisenhower Boulevard, and that Eisenhower was a man he very much admired, because Eisenhower understood the costs of war and strove to keep America out of it. He then made reference to a “rather hysterical” column by Fareed Zakaria in that morning’s Washington Post about McCain’s views on foreign policy. His voice was tight and measured.

“I’ve seen other stories and I’ve seen comments about my national-security speech,” McCain said, referring to an address he gave in Los Angeles a few weeks earlier. “The story line is as follows: ‘McCain’s not the same McCain. He’s changed, and now he’s become a hawk, and he is dramatically different from what he was.’ ” He recited this narrative as if repeating the nonsensical words of dullards. “And anybody is free to write whatever they want and form whatever opinions they want to form. But facts are facts. And the fact is that I know war, and I know the tragedy of war. And no one hates war more than veterans.”

From here, McCain went on to list for me some of the military actions he supported (Grenada, Panama) and some that he opposed (Beirut, Somalia). He had always followed the same set of values, he said, grounded in the premise that all people, not just Americans, were created equal and had inalienable rights. And when America could intervene militarily to further those values around the world without needless sacrifice in lives and money, he was all for it, and where we couldn’t, he was not, and there was nothing extreme about that.

“As far as people who advise me,” McCain went on, though I still hadn’t asked a question, “probably one of my most trusted advisers for the last 30 years is Henry Kissinger, not known as a hawk or a neocon.” McCain infused the word with sarcasm. “I also remember the days when Ronald Reagan was portrayed as a hawk and a neocon. I remember the near hysteria in response to his ‘tear down this wall.’ I remember the ‘Oh, you can’t do that, when you call the Soviets an evil empire.’ I remember all those things. Same people who are now saying — ” He stopped himself midsentence, then began again. “I’m always open to new ideas and new thoughts, but my principles were grounded many years ago in places like the National War College and other places where I have learned and studied and talked to people I admire and respect.

“So,” McCain said finally, “with that preface, I’d be glad to answer any questions you might have, and again, it’s always good to be with you.”

It’s rare to see a presidential candidate vent in quite this way, but clearly some of the criticism over his policies on Iraq and foreign policy in general — mild criticism, to this point — had wounded McCain. When he looks in the mirror, he does not see a reckless or belligerent leader, and yet that was the man his detractors claimed to see. A few weeks earlier, the liberal radio host Ed Schultz made headlines by calling McCain a “warmonger” and then happily repeating the charge on CNN. As McCain and I talked, the Democratic National Committee had begun broadcasting an ad that repeatedly showed him saying at a New Hampshire campaign event that he would be fine with keeping American troops in Iraq for 100 years. The quote had been ripped out of context — he went on to say that such a troop presence would be possible only without casualties, in the same way that American soldiers had remained quietly for decades in South Korea and Europe — but it had already become a staple of Democratic attacks, and McCain could expect to see it about half a million more times before November.

McCain’s major Los Angeles address seemed to have been written in part to reverse this perception. The speech began with McCain’s hatred of war, then moved on to stress his commitment to multilateralism and to ending global warming. McCain called, again, for a “League of Democracies” to foster cooperation among free nations. Only in the final minutes did he get around to even mentioning Iraq. Clearly, the campaign was starting to worry about McCain being Reaganized in this way — that is, of having the fall campaign become a referendum on whether he was stable and rational enough to be trusted with the nation’s nuclear codes.

McCain described himself, in that speech and in his preamble to our interview, as a “realistic idealist” — a phrase meant to bridge a divide inside his party. While there haven’t really been neat camps into which you can divide Republicans in the post-cold-war era, some rough labels did emerge throughout the ’90s. On one extreme were the isolationists, led most noisily by Pat Buchanan, who essentially believed that the end of the cold war should also have meant the end of America’s military involvement in distant lands. In the middle were the group known as realists, who were willing to use force, but only where the country’s vital strategic interests were at stake and where an international consensus could be forged. The realists identified with leaders like Kissinger and James Baker, the former secretary of state, who famously declared of Bosnia, “We do not have a dog in that fight.” And then, on the other end of the spectrum, you had the idealists, including most of those known as neocons. The idealists believed that American force could and should be used to promote American values abroad, whether or not the countries involved posed an immediate danger to national security and whether or not the rest of the world agreed.

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McCain has never been confused for an isolationist, but neither can he be confined to either of the other factions. One reason is temperamental; McCain just doesn’t like labels, and he isn’t very good at sticking to orthodoxies — a personality quirk he has tried hard to control during the campaign. “He’s not a guy who drinks Kool-Aid easily,” says Gary Hart, the former Democratic senator who was once close enough to McCain to have been a groomsman in his wedding. “He’s suspicious of any group who sees the world that simply.” Lorne Craner, a foreign-policy thinker who worked for McCain in the House and Senate in the 1980s, told me that McCain had a standing rule in his office then. All meetings were to be limited to half an hour, unless they were with either of two advisers: Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Reaganite idealist, or Brent Scowcroft, the former general who was a leader in the realist wing. McCain loved to hear from both of them at length.

It’s clear, though, that on the continuum that separates realists from idealists, McCain sits much closer to the idealist perspective. McCain has long been chairman of the International Republican Institute, run by Craner, which exists to promote democratic reforms in closed societies. He makes a point of meeting with dissidents when he visits countries like Georgia and Uzbekistan and has championed the cause of Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned leader of the Burmese resistance. Most important, as he made clear in his preamble to our interview, McCain considers national values, and not strategic interests, to be the guiding force in foreign policy. America exists, in McCain’s view, not simply to safeguard the prosperity and safety of those who live in it but also to spread democratic values and human rights to other parts of the planet.

McCain argues that his brand of idealism is actually more pragmatic in a post-9/11 world than the hard realism of the cold war. He rejects as outdated, for instance, a basic proposition of cold-war realists like Kissinger and Baker: that stability is always found in the relationship between states. Realists have long presumed that the country’s security is defined by the stability of its alliances with the governments of other countries, even if those governments are odious; by this thinking, your interests can sometimes be served by befriending leaders who share none of your democratic values. McCain, by contrast, maintains that in a world where oppressive governments can produce fertile ground for rogue groups like Al Qaeda to recruit and prosper, forging bonds with tyrannical regimes is often more likely to harm American interests than to help them.

As we spoke in Tampa, I asked McCain if it was true, as his friend Joe Lieberman and others suggested to me, that he had been brought to a more idealist way of thinking partly by the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. “I think so, I think so,” he said, nodding. “And Darfur today. I feel strongly about Darfur, and yet, and this is where the realist side comes in, how do we effectively stop the genocide in Darfur?” He seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question. “You know the complications with a place that’s bigger, I guess, than the size of Texas, and it’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is, who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up.

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Coming Home: The former P.O.W. arriving in Washington after five years in captivity, 1973, just after President Nixon negotiated the short-lived Paris Peace Accords.Credit
Corbis

“So I’ve always tried to make a case for the realist side,” he continued. “And I think it was pretty clear that in Kosovo, we could probably benefit the situation fairly effectively and fairly quickly. And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?”

McCain is known for being a gut thinker, averse to overarching doctrines or theory. But as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

The United States faced a similar obstacle in Myanmar, McCain went on, shaking his head sadly. “First of all, you’d have to gauge the opinion of the people over time, whether you’d be greeted as liberators or as occupiers,” McCain said. “I would be concerned about the possibility that if it were mishandled, we might see an insurgent movement.” He talked a bit about Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he called “one of the great figures of the 20th century,” but then wondered aloud if the American public would support a military intervention.

“It goes back to the Vietnam thing,” McCain told me. “I’m just not sure the American people would support a military engagement in Burma, no matter how justified the cause. And I can’t tell you exactly when it would be over. And I can’t tell you exactly what the reaction of the people there would be.”

Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

“I think we’ve learned some lessons,” McCain told me. “One is that the American people have to be willing to support it. But two, we need to work more in an international way to try to beneficially affect the situation. And you have to convince America and the world that every single avenue has been exhausted before we go in militarily. And we better think not a day later or a week later, but a year and 5 years and 10 years later. Because the attention span, unfortunately, of the American people, although pretty remarkable in some ways, is not inexhaustible.”

WHAT WAS STARTLING about this conversation was that, while McCain was talking about the dangers of intervening in a Zimbabwe or a Burma, he might just as well have been talking about the invasion of Iraq. Didn’t that country, too, have a colonial history that had been carelessly considered, to say the least? Didn’t the war’s proponents fail to plan more than a few weeks out or to ask the hard questions about how their soldiers might be greeted in the streets?

“Yes, I agree with you,” McCain said, nodding again, when I put this question to him directly. “It was one of the penalties that we paid. But remember, the major reason to go into Iraq were the weapons of mass destruction. That was the conventional wisdom at the time, not only held by the United States but certainly many other nations.”

This was, of course, an arguable point, and that argument, with the benefit of hindsight, will probably continue to rage in Washington and in political-science departments around the country for decades. But the invasion of Iraq is now five years past, and the question at the heart of the 2008 campaign — or one of them, anyway — is bound to revolve around a more current dilemma. Why, given all the lessons of military intervention that McCain himself had just laid out, does he think it still makes sense to stay? Having bemoaned the impact of Vietnam on the nation, why is McCain — alone among the veterans of that war in the Senate — determined to settle in for another long and costly counterinsurgency?

The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq can be too readily overstated. The very nature of the wars is markedly different, for better or worse; Vietnam was a Communist uprising against an autocratic government, while Iraq represents a multiparty, ethnic conflict more similar to that of the Balkans. The casualties, to this point, aren’t nearly analogous, either. The United States lost some 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam, compared with a death toll, after five years in Iraq, of about 4,000.

Still, in this current conflict there are echoes of Vietnam that have grown too loud to easily ignore. Both conflicts were entered into under pretenses that were later widely discredited. Reports from the front in Iraq depict American soldiers who find it difficult to discern friends from enemies as they try to navigate an unfamiliar culture, language and landscape. American leaders are talking yet again about transferring responsibility for the war to local forces and the police, but Iraqization doesn’t seem to be faring a whole lot better than Vietnamization did; last month, some 1,000 Iraqi troops deserted during a crucial battle in Basra. Veterans return from their tours with missing limbs and deep psychological trauma. Pro-war officials frame the conflict as a central front in a longer struggle against an evil ideology, and they warn ominously of the proliferation of terrorist cells that will ensue if the insurgents aren’t defeated in Iraq, just as the architects of Vietnam once promised a lethal fall of dominoes throughout Southeast Asia.

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"Safer Baghdad: McCain with Gen. David Petraeus and armed escorts during a visit to a Baghdad marketplace, April 2007.Credit
Sgt. Matthew Roe/Reuters

Like the war planners themselves, McCain made some assumptions before the invasion that turned out to be seriously flawed. He spoke in favor of the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government and military, a decision now widely considered to have been a disaster, and he predicted that American soldiers would be hailed as conquering heroes in Baghdad. But to his credit, he was also the first of the Iraq hawks to sound the alarm on the flailing occupation, singling out Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for stinging criticism. After visiting Baghdad and Basra in the summer of 2003, McCain labeled Rumsfeld’s military strategy a failure and began a long and lonely crusade for an influx of new troops to secure the capital and outlying areas — the tactic that came to be known as “the surge” when the president finally changed course three and a half years later and ordered another 20,000 troops into the theater.

The surge is unpopular with a lot of military leaders, mainly because of what they call “strategic stretch” — the resulting shortage of troops available to fight unforeseen conflicts in other parts of the globe. (There are now about 160,000 American troops tied down in Iraq, and those troops are already facing both extended tours and shorter intervals in between redeployments.) Some of the Pentagon’s top commanders — most recently Richard Cody, the vice chief of staff of the Army, who testified before Congress last month — have voiced concern about the military’s overall readiness at a time when the troop level in Afghanistan may soon reach 40,000 and when leading politicians, McCain prominently among them, have vowed to use military action if necessary to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. McCain maintains that the military can increase its ranks by offering cash and other incentives to recruits, but it has already significantly lowered its recruiting standards and may not be able to stoop much lower. As Gen. James Jones, the former NATO commander and a close friend of McCain’s, told me, “You can buy the numbers of troops, but you may not be able to buy the quality you need.”

Even so, McCain insists that the surge and the Pentagon’s new counterinsurgency strategy, which centers on a “hearts and minds” approach, can ultimately drive out insurgents and reduce American casualties in Iraq to virtually nothing. “Is it long and hard and tough? Yes,” McCain told me. “Has Al Qaeda been beaten? No, but they certainly have been diminished.” (To the dismay of many of his critics, McCain often uses “Al Qaeda” as a shorthand for the Iraqi insurgent group that calls itself Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.) “And it’s obviously not just Al Qaeda,” he went on. “It’s Shiite militias. It’s former Baathists who are still unhappy. It’s corruption within the police that we have to worry about.

“All I can say is, the surge is succeeding,” he said. “If someone wants to disagree with that, they’re free to, but I have statistics — whether they be instances of violence, whether it be U.S. casualties, whatever it may be — that prove that this new tactic is succeeding. So I’m willing to stick with it.”

A LOT OF McCAIN’S fellow veterans in Washington seem confounded by what they see as his obvious failure to absorb the lessons of Vietnam. Jack Murtha, the Pennsylvania congressman and decorated Vietnam vet who became an early and outspoken critic of the war, told me that watching Iraq unfold convinced him, for the first time, that American troops could never have prevailed in Vietnam, no matter how long they stayed. “These kinds of wars cannot be won militarily,” he said flatly. Another Democratic congressman with a Purple Heart, Mike Thompson of California, told me that promises of victory in Iraq sounded painfully familiar. “When I was in Vietnam, the members of Congress knew that we weren’t going to be there forever, that we would have to redeploy, and in the time between when they knew that and when we redeployed, a lot of boys were injured and killed,” Thompson said. “I think Senator McCain has been an outstanding public servant, but I think he’s wrong on this.”

In McCain’s mind, however, there is a different kind of symmetry linking Vietnam and Iraq. Talking to him about it, you come to understand that he has, indeed, applied lessons from the first war to the second — but they are the lessons that he learned not in combat or in the Hanoi Hilton but in the pages of the books he read at the National War College in the 1970s. To McCain, the first four years of the Iraq war, as prosecuted by the Bush administration, seem strikingly similar to the years in Vietnam before Creighton Abrams arrived on the scene.

“It’s a little bit eerily reminiscent, in that search-and-destroy is basically the same tactic that Rumsfeld, Casey, Sanchez, et al. employed,” McCain told me, referring to George Casey and Ricardo Sanchez, the two previous generals to command coalition forces in Iraq. “Go out, kill bad people and then go back to base. That’s basically what search-and-destroy was. We obviously failed to learn that lesson in history.” In McCain’s war, then, David Petraeus, the more innovative general who took over in 2007, is now playing the part of Abrams, pursuing a winning strategy that needs only the patience of the American people and their government to ultimately succeed.

“After nearly four years of a failed strategy, the difference in one year is dramatic,” McCain says. “If they make that same progress in the next year,” he predicts, “I think it’s going to be quite impactful on American public opinion, as well as, more importantly, events on the ground.”

The lesson McCain drew from Vietnam all those years ago is that you cannot turn your back on a war when at last you figure out how to win it, and he is determined not to let that happen again. Far from having failed to internalize the legacy of Vietnam, as some of his friends in the Senate suspect, he is, if anything, entirely driven by it. “I don’t think you can isolate John’s views in Iraq from his experience in Vietnam,” Gary Hart told me. “Whether he is aware of it or not — and I want to tread carefully here, because I don’t like psychologizing people — I don’t think he can separate those things in his mind. In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.”

JOHN McCAIN HAS NEVER been very good at political artifice. Like every politician I’ve known, McCain will sometimes surrender to the cheap ploy or prevarication when the moment demands it, but it is often with a smirk or a wince, some hard-to-miss signal that he knows he’s up to no good. In the more serious instances when he knows he has put expedience over principle (his reversal on the Bush tax cuts just in time for the campaign season may well turn out to be one of them), he has an almost therapeutic need to acknowledge it later, as he did when he told South Carolinians, weeks after losing the brutal primary there in 2000, that he had been wrong to defend the Confederate flag just to win their votes. And so, whether you agree with him or not, there is a notable honesty to his position on the war in Iraq. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have spent the primary season competing over who’s more eager to ship out of Iraq, but everyone associated with their campaigns knows that withdrawal will not happen quickly or without peril. McCain’s pitch, on the other hand, is as straightforward as it is stripped of political charm. We made a mess in Iraq, he says, but it’s our mess now, and we have to stay on and fix it.

Ultimately, McCain is relying on the same strategy to achieve success both in Iraq and in the November election. In each endeavor, McCain is staking everything on the notion that the public, having seen the success of a new military strategy, can be convinced that the war is, in fact, winnable and worth the continued sacrifice. Absent that national retrenching, McCain admits that this war, like the one in Vietnam, is probably doomed. Near the end of our conversation in Tampa, I asked him if he would be willing to change course on Iraq if the violence there started to rise again. “Oh, we’d have to,” he replied. “It’s not so much what McCain would do. American public opinion will not tolerate such a thing.”

The problem is that there’s actually no evidence to suggest that a reduction in casualties in Iraq will translate into a greater public tolerance for a protracted engagement there. According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence that the surge is improving the situation on the ground rose sharply between last summer and this spring; 40 percent of those polled in March said the surge is working, compared with 22 percent last July, while 38 percent said it was making no difference, down from 51 percent last year. For McCain, that’s no small measure of vindication. And yet, during the same period, even as optimism about the new strategy grew, the percentage of Americans who say they want a timetable for gradual withdrawal — those, in other words, who agreed primarily with the two Democratic candidates — remained almost exactly the same, rising to 41 percent from 39 percent. (Another 18 percent have consistently said they want to get out right away.) Nor has the success of the surge in reducing American casualties done a thing to convince the public that the invasion made sense in the first place. According to another Gallup poll released a few weeks ago, 63 percent of Americans now believe it was a mistake to go to war — an all-time high.

It doesn’t help that McCain has never put his argument for staying into some larger context that might explain what he really means by “winning” the war in Iraq. If you ask him to define victory, his answer is that Americans soldiers will have stopped dying, and that the Iraqi military and government will be functioning on their own. That would be a great day, no doubt, but surely the overarching purpose of a war can’t be to stop more soldiers from dying in it. (On the one notable occasion when McCain tried to put a more hopeful spin on progress in Iraq, during a visit there last spring, the result was an unqualified public-relations debacle: strolling through an outdoor market in Baghdad market wearing a flak jacket and surrounded by what seemed liked a regiment of U.S. soldiers, McCain declared that life for Iraqis was at last returning to normal. The next day, by some accounts, 21 Shiite workers at the market were abducted and killed.) McCain’s main reason for continuing on in Iraq seems to be that we’re already there and must not accept defeat, and that’s an argument that probably feels all too familiar to many Americans who lived through a decade of aimless war in Vietnam, to no discernible end.

Undaunted, McCain soldiers on toward November and what could be his final campaign. When he ran in 2000, his philosophy of national greatness — the importance, as he always puts it, of “serving a cause greater than one’s self” — found its expression in ideas like national service and campaign reform, proposals that independents and even many liberals could embrace. For a time then, McCain, adrift within his own party, was almost certainly the most popular politician in America. This time, his theme of selflessness is bound up, irrevocably, with Bush’s unpopular war. Democrats, alarmed over their own disunity, can hardly wait to start pummeling McCain with Iraq. While I was working on this article, the Center for American Progress, the left’s leading policy center in Washington, took the liberty of sending over a 10-page litany of McCain’s selected comments on Iraq since 2002, delineated by helpful subheadings like “The War Begins — Rosy Outlook” and “The Critical Time Is Always Right Around the Corner.”

McCain shrugs this off and insists that he will never waver from his support of the war, no matter what the personal cost. “As I said a year ago,” he told me, “I would rather lose a campaign than a war.” If he doesn’t make the most persuasive argument of his life, he risks losing both.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM40 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The McCain Doctrines. Today's Paper|Subscribe